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Get your head out of the clouds: top benefits to cloud migration

By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer

We’re talking about it; you’re talking about it; the whole industry is talking about it. Cloud migration is a top-of-mind topic for not only data storage professionals, but enterprise IT teams altogether. We’ve talked about what to consider when migrating your workloads before, but we’re taking it back to the basics for the start of our cloud migration blog series. The most common question customers ask us is why do people decide to move to the cloud? Here are three reasons we are seeing customers migrate to the cloud.

Planning for disaster scenarios: Most of us can date our fear of disaster back to the infamous tornado scene in “The Wizard of Oz.” But for IT professionals, we have much greater fears than tornados and witches on broomsticks. By far, the most common use of cloud storage is for disaster recovery. By replicating data to a cloud provider, you automatically have an additional layer of security and reliability should anything pose a threat to your infrastructure. With disaster recovery, performance limitations are usually bandwidth-related, but performance indicators (like latency, for example) aren’t normally a factor.

The need for virtualized primary storage: Attend a dinner party with 10 or more people and at least one of them will work for a virtual company. As more and more companies become virtual and global, the cloud is becoming the primary storage base. In this model, the on-prem access is considered the hub of deployment and the primary copy of data is in the cloud. If your workforce spends more time outside the office than in it, you may want to get cloudy.

Money, money, money: Naturally, it’s a priority for all companies to optimize cost efficiency while maintaining a reliable infrastructure. With the ability to store secondary data in the cloud, your team is cutting costs by partially eliminating on-prem storage. Not only does this cut down on constant physical management, but you also won’t need to continually replace your hardware when it sees wear and tear, saving you both time and money. For primary tier 1 application workloads, most experts believe that migrating to the cloud is not a money saving proposition.

So, what’s holding some companies back from cloud migration? Often, we hear storage engineers are concerned about being able to maintain their current performance when they migrate their workloads to the cloud. Load DynamiX Enterprise offers Storage Performance Analytics, which allow storage professionals to understand the workload I/O patterns that affect storage performance. In our next blog in this series, we will dive deeper into how the Load DynamiX Enterprise solutions can help your public cloud storage migration initiative.